Fly in a Broken Window

fly-in-a-broken-window

Via Magnetic Poetry Online Kits (hat tip: sister AE). Also influenced by Tiel Aisha Ansari. Yes, I know I’m not an artist!

I was honored to have inspired the prompt at Read Write Poem this week with my “Blue Jeans” magnetic poem. You can find links to the other responses here.

While Shuffle Words compositions are constrained by the small number of total words, the problem with Magnetic Poetry Online’s Poet Edition (which sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) is the limited number of good verbs. Whoever put their word collection together seems to have been under the impression that poetry is chiefly concerned with nouns and adjectives.

Filed in Poems & poem-like things, Poets and poetry. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.Print Print

13 Responses to Fly in a Broken Window

  1. art predator says:

    very cool! congrats on being inspirational in a fly on the wall kinda way! (or weigh depending on words available)

  2. Jo says:

    slow as smoke angels — KILLER LINE. I’m in love with that line. I want to try this too.

  3. Yeah, love the wording and the shape of this!

  4. Natalie says:

    ” Will you linger for a melon?”

    Yes!

  5. Linda from TX says:

    That cuts it! Out come the magnetic words again. My granddaughter loves it when we have them on the refrigerator. We obviously need to get more creative. Thanks for the inspiration.

  6. marja-leena says:

    Love every one of the phrases here! What fun and inspiration.

  7. Anonymous says:

    This is quite amazing. I looked at shufflewords and felt totally uninspired.

  8. This is quite amazing. I looked at shufflewords and felt totally uninspired. (forgot to put my name on previous post)

  9. Karen says:

    Wow! There is no part of that poem that is not wonderful.

  10. Dave says:

    Thanks for the kind words, y’all.

    Too late it occurred to me why it doesn’t look much like a fly: NO WINGS! They would have been really tricky, though, at this scale.

  11. christine says:

    Prisoner of any moist hole — eek!

    Lots of stray lines to gleen from this experimental poem. I like all the gizmos, they’re fun to play with. I have a set of magnetic poetry in Spanish I used to use for my students. I had to pluck some of the more risque words from the batch, since it was public school!

Leave a Reply

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

URLs are converted to links, and three or more links in one comment will cause it to be sent to the moderation queue. Constructive criticism is always welcome. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Smorgasblog

    • Metaphors for the Moon
      Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
      of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

    • Cleaning My Attic
      Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

    • Clumps and Voids
      The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

    • botanizing
      On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

    • The Twitching Line
      My uncle, gutting a fish:
      removing the fins from either side,
      tipping the knife below

      the little anus, pointing the tail-
      end away, slitting it to the gills,
      then plunging in a hand

      to scoop the organs out, soft
      and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

    • The Ordinary and the Wild
      I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

    • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
      So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

    • Chatoyance
      And on the other side, what I
      set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
      a crease scored in bent blades of grass
      where I forgot the wall stood,
      my footsteps blurring as the
      grass unbends.

    • Velveteen Rabbi
      There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

    • Will Buckingham
      My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
    — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

`